When Paul Chelan visited Martin Heidegger in his isolated cabin in the Black Forest

In 1967, the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Chelan made a visit to Martin Heidegger’s renowned ski hut nestled in the German Black Forest. It was in this very location, four decades prior, that the German philosopher penned Being and Time, a cornerstone of 20th-century existentialism. To this day, the humble hut remains a must-visit site for any ardent Heideggerian.

Just a day before, at the University of Freiburg, Chelan had recited his poetry to a packed audience. When the poet and philosopher crossed paths for the first time the following day, a journalist proposed they take a photograph together. Chelan declined. The shadow of Heidegger’s Nazi affiliations loomed large between them. After all, the philosopher had never publicly renounced his political wrongdoings. Despite Chelan’s admiration for Heidegger’s philosophy, he was not ready to grant the philosopher the political redemption he so fervently sought.

John Felsteiner, biographer of Chelan, has remarked on the encounter thusly: “It is clear that a meeting with the man who served as a rector at Freiburg under Hitler from 1933-1934, who in 1935 extolled ‘the inner truth and greatness’ of Nazism, who in 1936 still signed his letters with ‘Heil Hitler!’, who had his followers salute Nazism and conspicuously wore a lapel pin, and who continued to pay his party membership dues until 1945 – a meeting with such a man could only be fraught, particularly given Heidegger’s post-war silence on these matters.”

In the poem “Todtnauberg”-named after the location of Heidegger’s hut- Chelan recounts signing the hut’s guestbook, with “a hope for a thoughtful word to reach the heart” – a word of remorse. But his hopes were met with deafening silence. No words of contrition emerged from the philosopher. Adding to the tragic irony of the already fraught situation, Tod is the German word for death, and “Todesfuge” is the poem that propelled Chelan to international literary fame post-war.

By the poem’s end, Chelan, a former concentration camp prisoner, ominously declares: “Death is a master from Germany”. This line is arguably the most frequently quoted from Chelan’s remarkable body of work. It is worth recalling the haunting opening lines of the poem:

The linguistic overlap between “Todesfuge” and the name of the former Nazi Heidegger’s mountain retreat undoubtedly stirred the poet who had felt alienated from life. The creation of “Todtnauberg” must have acted as a negative affirmation of his overall life experience. Like many Central European Jews, Celan, a native of Bukovina in Romania, had been deeply influenced by German cultural traditions during his youth. He regarded Germany, like Heidegger, as a nation of Dichter und Denker – a nation of poets and thinkers. It was the land of Geist und Bildung (spirit and culture), a culture that prided itself on spiritual inwardness and the obligation to cultivate one’s self. It was the nation of Goethe, Schiller, and Hölderlin – poets who, in the era of German classicism, elevated local German traditions to the level of world literature. Madame de Stael, in her renowned treatise De Allemagne [On Germany] (1809), would chastise her compatriots for not emulating the Germans more after two centuries of war and revolution; while the French were preoccupied with various political excesses, including the madness of world conquest, the Germans had demonstrated a linguistic flourish comparable only to classical antiquity.

But how could German-Jewish writers and thinkers reconcile their personal attachment to German culture with the horrific atrocities that this cultural tradition produced a century or so later? This is the exact dilemma Celan grappled with repeatedly in his poetry. The narrative resonates powerfully in ‘Heidegger’s Children’: the struggle of Heidegger’s most gifted students – many of whom were Jewish – to reconcile their deep-rooted debt to German intellectual traditions with the sinister ways these traditions were exploited during the Nazi era. Undeniably, the unholy alliance between Nazism and Kultur was actively promoted by the academic elite, who enthusiastically embraced the regime as a golden opportunity to quell the chaos of the “liberal system” and reassert the value of the authentic German tradition.

The dilemma for Chelan: determining which aspects of German culture had been tainted and which remained relatively untouched. This conflict manifested both in the formal structure of his poetry – marked by violent disjunctions and overused neologisms – and in the content itself. Like a post-apocalyptic handyman, Chelan sought to extricate solace and meaning from a language that had been wielded for unspeakably tragic ends. The issue must have been at the forefront of his thoughts during his visit to Heidegger’s retreat in the Schwarzwald [Black Forest]. Upon hearing from the German philosopher, the successor to the scholarly traditions that Chelan held dear, he waited with “a hope for a word from the thinker to reach the heart,” a gesture of reconciliation that never came.

Like many Germans of his generation, Heidegger never truly confronted the sins of Germany’s past. In this regard, he certainly did not make it easier for his Jewish “children” – several of whom pleaded with him after the war to publicly and directly disassociate himself from his collaborations and involvements during the Nazi era, which continued to tarnish his reputation. Instead, in the relatively few instances within the extensive Heideggerian body of work where he condescends to discuss the war atrocities committed by the Nazis, one finds only deflections and rationalizations – such as the late 1940s speech in which Heidegger offensively equates “the industrial production of corpses in gas chambers” with “mechanized agriculture”.

Three years after his disheartening encounter with Heidegger, Chelan met a fate tragically common among Holocaust survivors: suicide. He drowned in the Seine.

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The introduction to the book by RICHARD WALLIN, “THE CHILDREN OF HEIDEGGER – Hanna Arendt, Karl Levitt, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse”, recently published by the University Publications of Crete, translated by Manos Vassilakis

 

From the publisher’s press release: Martin Heidegger is one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, and his work has sparked many innovative and thought-provoking developments in contemporary thought. His charisma in the lecture halls was captivating, and during the 1920s, he drew in Germany’s most promising young intellectuals.